Ignoring warnings, Icarus flew too close to the sun; the wax melted, the wings fell off, and he fell into the sea. The Amsterdam Bankruptcy Court features a representation of Icarus, a warning of the dangers of vaulting ambition.
Serepisos' long goodbye has kept the soccer community on tenterhooks, but as one sugar daddy rode into the sunset, a posse of benefactors came galloping over the hill.
Now there are suggestions that expatriate moneybags Owen Glenn wants to buy a chunk of the Warriors from fellow EMB Eric Watson. Why do rich men have this compulsion to sink money into sports clubs? The answer must be a combination of ego, altruism, arrested development and because they can, since these investments seldom pay off commercially.
One of the few people to have made money from investing in a sports club is former US President George W. Bush, not many people's idea of a financial wizard, who acquired a stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team for US$770,000 and sold it a few years later for US$18 million.
However, it appears both transactions had more to do with the machinations of Texas politics and the good-old-boys network than the law of supply and demand.
If Serepisos was a country rather than an individual, it would be business as usual. He was reported as having assets worth $232.5 million against debts of $204 million, which would make him prudence personified by Greek standards. (It must be said, though, that these are paper valuations; in reality an asset is worth only what someone is prepared to pay for it.)
For some time now, Greece's debt has been more than 100 per cent of gross domestic product. It was no secret that corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency were rife, that the shadow - untaxed - economy was one of the biggest in the developed world at around 25 per cent of GDP, and that the Greek government was playing fast and loose with European Union fiscal guidelines.
But the EU looked the other way, and the banks carried on lending regardless.
Greece is the cradle of democracy so it's perhaps fitting that what we are seeing on the streets of Athens is either democracy in action or democracy gone terribly wrong, depending on your point of view.
The EU - Germany in all but name - has been baulking at continuing to bail Greece out unless and until it puts its house in order, a euphemism for swingeing austerity measures. However, the Greek public is baulking at taking its medicine.
On the face of it the Greeks are behaving like spoilt brats, blaming everyone but themselves, refusing to accept that they're living way beyond their means, and insisting that foreigners continue to fund their lifestyle.
But this is how electorates often behave, seeing the democratic process essentially in terms of what's in it for them. That means voting for the party promising the most extravagant lolly scramble while relying on the panderers to ensure things don't get out of hand.
The problem is that when one party decides things are getting out of hand, it's likely to be undercut by another party declaring it has a magic formula so we can have it both ways - avoid disaster without sacrifice. A vote for a formula that defies common sense and simple arithmetic is a vote for a fool's paradise.
This week we saw an example of the inertia that sets in when the public cares for little but its standard of living and politicians can't think beyond the next election.
Yes, Don Brash's call for the decriminalisation of cannabis may have been garbled, politically inept and overshadowed by Act's incredible vanishing act, but it was still a rare instance of a politician challenging a failed but apparently sacrosanct policy.
As such, it deserved better than a kneejerk dismissal.
The Greeks aren't the only people who act as if democracy means never doing today what we can put off until it's our children's problem.
